Category: Content Marketing

It’s often a company’s first impression: a digital introduction to an organization, the problem it tackles, and the solutions it offers. The sophistication of landing pages can vary. Some companies use their homepage as a landing page. Others create specific pages that target discrete customer profiles and move them through a marketing funnel.

Landing pages also take various forms depending on the growth stage of a company. But that’s one of the common missteps that I see: landing pages prioritize the story of the startup, rather than the journey of the customer with the startup.

Landing page copy improves the more customers see themselves in it. Rethink and revise your landing page by building it around three elements. If that’s too much effort and you’re looking for fast fixes, the following tips will improve your current landing page copy. – Read more

Along with FAQ and Contact pages, the About Us page is one of the first supporting pages you’ll likely create for your website, regardless of the industry you’re in.

They may go by different labels—“About”, “Story”, “Mission”—but these types of pages generally serve the same key purpose: to be the go-to page for a brand to say, “This is who we are.”

When a visitor wants to learn more about you or your business, it’s the page they’ll look for.

Unfortunately, About Us pages are too often treated as an obligation rather than the valuable opportunity they are to connect with your customers by selling your story, your vision, your mission, and what makes you, YOU.

What an About Us page is really for
The problem with many About Us pages is they’re an afterthought—a link buried in the footer of a website that leads to a few hastily written paragraphs about a company.

What an About Us page should be is a goal-oriented sales page, one that focuses on highlighting the biggest selling points of your story and brand, making a strong impression on curious customers. – Read more

Every business is aware of the potential power of content marketing, but in the rush to create content many of us have lost our way. Only 50% of B2B content ever reaches an audience, and the B2C picture is bleaker still with only 20% reaching an audience.

None of this diminishes the potency of content marketing as a means of driving revenue. In fact, it just creates opportunities for smart marketers to stand out from the crowd. The more noise there is, the more important the signal becomes.

Download this ebook and learn:

The current state of the content marketing industry

Discuss the challenges marketers are facing as they battle for customers’ attention and aim to quantify the ROI of their content

A new way of approaching content that uses technology to drive an intuitive, profitable content process from research through to production and promotion

Tougher regulations and rising distrust have companies scrambling to figure out how to create stronger ties with their customers

Companies have long collected data on consumers to determine what people want and who their potential customers might be.

But for anybody doing in business in Europe, how they go about collecting that data just got a lot more difficult. And corporate marketing departments are rushing to figure out what to do next. – Read more

You’d love to get that major publication or TV network to cover your event, embed your video or quote your chief executive in an economic forecast story.

The last thing you want is for reporters to delete your press release the moment the email notification pops up on their screens.

Surely everyone knows by now that stuffy, old-style press releases don’t cut it when reporters are busier than ever and newspapers want multimedia assets for their online editions. Yet ill-considered pitches keep flooding the inboxes of the dwindling number of journalists.

How to stand out? Here are a few tips:

1. Hook them with the subject line.

Getting a journalist to open your email is the first step in earning coverage. Write a snappy subject line for your email, says Elise Copps of Hamilton Health Sciences.

“Think about headlines that make you click through to articles you come across in your social feeds, and try to replicate the level of curiosity they spark,” she says. “An email with the subject line, ‘Experts warn against this risky trend,’ is much more likely to be opened than ‘MEDIA RELEASE: Experts say Tide Pod challenge is risky.’” – Read

For some time now, paid advertising has been used as a reliable strategy to gain new customers. Unfortunately, paid ads are becoming less effective.

The modern-day consumer doesn’t want to be blatantly sold to; they want to organically learn about a company or product and determine whether it fits their needs at their own pace.

Content marketing is the answer to their prayers. By making your brand a credible and authoritative resource on topics that matter to your potential customers, your business is more likely to get discovered by the right audience. – Read

Facebook recently announced some big changes coming to their newsfeed algorithm that impacts brands of all sizes. As the social ecosystem of “experts” broke down, blogged about, and summarized their thoughts on these changes, what surprised me the most was how many marketers that claim to be experts in this space were shocked to see these changes.

Facebook and other top social networks have been migrating toward a pay to play model for the last 3-5+ years.

For years we have been warning our marketers, brands, our clients and social media training academy students to stop building their business on rented Facebook land. It’s risky business.

It should be no shock to anyone that the social networks have no choice but to attempt to at least slow down the mounds of content overload and spam that is ruining the end user experience.

Will 2018 be the year that marketers and business leaders finally wake up and realize social media, content marketing, branding and digital marketing is not simply about creating more and more content?

Will it be the year that the majority finally learns that quality over quantity is what wins not only in the short term but also the long term? It’s not only about the current sprint on Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram. Instead the focus should be on building a sustainable business and integrated platform that will endure the shifts and changes, big and small. – Read

In a late-2017 Econsultancy survey, one in six brand marketers stated that “data-driven marketing that focuses on the individual” was “the single most exciting opportunity” for their organisation.

Following the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal, though, things have changed. Concerns about public sentiment now override maximizing the use of consumer data, leaving data-driven marketing with an uncertain future.

Brand marketers still have a job to do, though, and many still feel that they are better off using data to help, even though they know that they have to tread carefully.

So how should marketers proceed in the current climate? How can they continue with their data-driven marketing plans?

To find out, I discussed the issue of data-driven marketing in 2018 with Alex Sibois, Managing Director APAC at Lotame and came up with the following suggestions: – Read

Gone are the good old days of traditional marketing. Today’s trends revolve all around content marketing.

Are we surrounded by content marketing misconceptions? If so, then let’s clear them all today!

1. Content marketing is an easy way to attract masses
The world is a big place. It is not only you and me who are blogging or promoting our contents, there are millions of them out there trying to do the same.

Out of the total number of websites worldwide, WordPress itself comprises around 30% of the content management system. – Read

“Content marketing is the gap between what brands produce and what consumers actually want.”

All this technology, all this data, all this new thinking—all of it is transforming marketing both operationally and strategically. Whereas once marketing was seen as the fluffy stuff—or, in the case of one company I worked at, the place that sticks a logo on letterheads and merchandise (car phone chargers! headphones!)—now there is a real drive towards proving return on investment. And where there is ROI, there’s more clout.

So with all this technology, data, new thinking—marketing transformation—how is it that some CMOs are still trying to prove their worth? As the CMO reaches the top table, they must move away from vanity metrics and begin to think about more robust ways to drive repeatable, predictable, and scalable revenue. The modern marketing leader is in the business of driving revenue, not spending money with no returns. – Read